Many Web services projects never make it out of the "pilot" stage.
While free tools and direct connections work fine in small
implementations, they fail to scale, suffer from reliability problems,
and are difficult to secure. Web service intermediaries provide
answers to these problem. While Web service intermediaries may not
show up in the standard Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
discussions, they're crucial to successfully implementing large scale
SOA-based systems. This talk will focus on the function of Web
service intermediaries and how they can turn a pilot project in a
secure, reliable, scalable, production-ready implementation.

The talk will be based on the experience I've gained reviewing intermediary products, including the XML firewall reviews I'm working on right now. As time gets closer to the talk, I'll be posting some of my ideas here.